the abortion rate is declining -- for some women

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/02/the-abortion-rate-is-declining-for-some-women.html



Last week, the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice think tank based in New York, released a study showing that the abortion rate in the United States has fallen to its lowest level since 1973, when Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. Based on a comprehensive survey of abortion providers in all fifty states, the study found that the number of pregnancy terminations performed between 2008 and 2011 decreased by thirteen per cent. The decline was generally hailed as welcome news by advocates on both sides of the abortion conflict. “The right-to-life movement is succeeding,” Carol Tobias, the president of the National Right to Life organization, said of the findings. Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, responded by tweeting, “PP is proud to provide abortion & #BirthControl that prevents the need for abortion in the first place.”

Less widely noted was another, more disquieting trend: the increasingly pronounced class and racial divisions within the population of women having unintended pregnancies and abortions. As I noted in an article in the magazine on a troubled chain of clinics, the over-all abortion rate fell by eight per cent between 2000 and 2008 but rose among poor women by eighteen per cent. Last December, another Guttmacher Institute study revealed that, during this same eight-year period, the rate of unintended pregnancies was more than five times higher among poor women than among women whose income was at least twice the federal poverty level. The same report found that significant ethnic and racial differences existed even when controlling for income, with the rate of unintended pregnancies among minority women more than twice the rate among white women.

It is possible that these disparities have narrowed slightly in recent years (the data collected by the Guttmacher Institute in its most recent study has not yet been sorted by income and race). But few analysts are betting on this. “I think we will very likely see a continuing disparity between wealthier women and non-wealthy women—the poor and the non-poor—as well as a disproportionate representation of women of color,” says Carole Joffe, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and the author of several books about abortion.

Low-income women tend to have less access to the most reliable forms of birth control—in particular, long-acting intrauterine devices (I.U.D.s), which are extremely effective, and which the new Guttmacher study touted as a potential factor behind the recent decline in the over-all abortion rate. It was not the first study to suggest such a link. In 2012, an article published in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology reported on an experimental project in St. Louis, where between 2007 and 2011 a cohort of nine thousand two hundred and fifty-six adolescents and women at high risk for unintended pregnancies were informed of the superior effectiveness of I.U.D.s and offered the contraceptive method of their choice at no cost. The abortion rate in this group promptly fell to less than half of the regional and national rates.

[sufrommich]

1. "low income women tend to have less access

to birth control".This is why low income women are more likely to need abortions, and yet the anti choice zealots work to make sure those women are denied access to free birth control.